KaKaRoToKS interview part 2

You have asked, and we have got you the answers! Read on for our 2nd part of our interview with famed PS3 Hacker, KaKaRoTo. We filtered through the questions and have asked any that we felt were necessary and not total n00bish!

ismail asks: Since you are the lead developer for aMSN, do you have any intentions on porting it to the PS3?

KaKaRoTo: No, I have no intention of porting it to the PS3, because aMSN is written in Tcl/Tk, and it would mean porting the Tcl/Tk interpreter to the PS3. I also don’t plan on doing any kind of homebrew development, it’s not challenging or motivating enough.

djp: So in other words, once you are running Linux on your PS3 you can use it with the TCL/TK interpreter

itsevilbert asks: do you think this would have ever happened in the first place if Sony enabled OtherOS on the slim to begin with?

KaKaRoTo: I honestly can’t speculate on what might have happened, but I do think that removing OtherOS was really something that pissed off the hackers and gave them the motivation to try and break the PS3′s security, but it’s also always possible that someone would have done this regardless.

JakeAnthraX asks: What is your entire goal in this project and how long do you plan on developing for this platform?

KaKaRoTo: I’ll just paste something that I tweeted today that explains my goals for doing this : My main and probably only reason for working on the PS3 was the curiosity, the challenge, the fun, and most importantly the knowledge I would gain from this experience. The satisfaction of achieving something you’ve spent hours debugging is incredible, and the knowledge you gain from it has no price.

KaKaRoTo: For how long I plan on developing… I don’t know, I don’t make any kind of plans, if something comes up that looks challenging and fun, I’ll do it, otherwise, I see no reason for me to waste my time on it.

Kacex asks: Well, my question regards homebrew… While at the moment we cannot run unsigned homebrew, when those apps are signed, PSN friends could see that I’m running these apps, therefore Sony could too, and that could potentially lead to ban… Is this correct? So basically homebrew developers would have to implement some kind of stealth way for someone to use it, could that feature be implemented on this kind of homebrew? And I don’t mean “Look I’m playing Lemmings”, something that doesn’t share the current game being played for those apps.

KaKaRoTo: obviously anything is possible when patching the right thing, so if somebody wants to do this, they probably could, but I’m not interested in doing that. I also think that Sony could find many other ways to detect a jailbroken system (like a new firmware update that actually hashes all the filesystem during boot and makes sure no file was modified in it). For now, the people who want to install custom/modified firmware, or to jailbreak their machines, should be smart enough to know that they are breaching the license agreement with Sony, and that it’s Sony’s rights to prevent them from accessing their service (PSN) if they wish to. If they want to take that risk, they have to accept the consequences. In my case, I never used my jailbroken PS3 to connect to PSN.

DiggingForFire asks: Can we expect an MFW with working PS2 emulation from you?

KaKaRoTo: PS2 emulation requires the Emotion Engine chip on the hardware, and I won’t try to make some sort of software-only emulation (that’s not my area of expertise at all). Although the psjailbreak didn’t allow people to use PS1/PS2 games even on old backward compatible machines, the MFW that I built does allow PS1/PS2 games to run when the machine supports it through hardware.

Brandon asked: You said before that you want to be responsible and not allow piracy with something that you do, yet it is known that you can use PL3, the payload you developed, with backup managers, even though it could have been made to not support it. Why is it that you were willing to allow it with the payload, but not with a firmware modification?

KaKaRoTo: Thanks a good question Brandon. The reason is simple, PL3 was an incremental modification on a payload that was already released by the psjailbreak team, which itself already allowed backups to run. I didn’t implement backup support into PL3, it was there, and I just kept it there. With this new MFW, not only is it new and there is no already available solution for backups (so I have no reason to actually spend time to add support for it) but also, allowing backups (or piracy) to run means modifying the LV2 kernel, and doing that can be dangerous because a single mistake could lead to an irreversible brick of the machine and I’m not willing to take that risk, not for my PS3 and not for the PS3 of those who would use my tool to create their own modified firmware.

hotzenplots asks: I have quite a lot of trouble with HDCP: despite all my equipment is rather new and supports even HDMI 1.4 I continue to have no picture on my TV half of the time. So my question is: is it possible to disable the HDCP protection of the Playstation now that the software is wide open? Or is that a hardware thing? And if it’s possible, are you interested in working on that?

KaKaRoTo: After googling a little, I found out that the Debug firmware has a Enable/Disable HDCP option. So it’s possible you could disable it by upgrading to a debug firmware from service mode. Or maybe wait for the Rebug PUP firmware and see if the option is available there.

Taro asks: Whats your favorite PS3 game?

KaKaRoTo: oh, I got quite a few! I usually have a favorite game until another game is released and blows my mind.. but I’d say my top favorites would be (in no particular order) : Uncharted 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid, Batman Arkham Asylum, inFAMOUS, Heavy Rain, Darksiders, Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse and of course Braid

Rei Yano asks: Do you know how cool you are?KaKaRoTo: euhh…. no comment…